Microsoft struggles to restore services as global outage persists for hours

Microsoft service disruptions extended into working hours across Asia-Pacific on Friday, after email and communications services failed for thousands of users in the United States, as the company continued efforts to address server-related issues.

Outage tracking site Downdetector reported over 130,000 complaints about problems with Outlook in the US at the peak of the outage on Thursday, with the disruption persisting for around 12 hours.

The fallout affected government entities in Australia, Japan, and the US, as well as companies including OpenAI and Anthropic. The US House of Representatives also reported an impact on its users, confirming that its engineers are working with Microsoft to resolve the issue.

Microsoft said it has implemented modifications to the affected servers, but a full recovery has not yet been achieved, despite partial improvements in some regions. The company added that it is considering additional measures to enhance infrastructure stability.

This marks the second disruption to Microsoft 365 services this year, which may prompt institutions to scrutinize the reliability of the cloud services they depend on to run their operations, especially as outages spread across multiple geographic regions and the challenges in fully restoring services persist.